Takach named managing director of Notre Dame’s cSEND

In addition to his oversight of the business and operational functions of cSEND, his responsibilities will include growing and strengthening the University of Notre Dame’s energy-related research, education and outreach across campus and on a national level. He will also work with faculty on large multi-investigator grant applications; work to augment research funding; foster high-quality, high-impact scholarly contributions, including seminars, symposia, workshops and conferences; promote business development with industrial sponsors and partners; and develop relationships with energy-related governmental agencies and industrial enterprises on the state and national levels.

“We’re delighted to have someone of Dr. Takach’s stature to lead the University into the next generation of energy-related research, education and outreach and to ensure continued financial viability of resources to support these activities at the University of Notre Dame,” Joan F. Brennecke, the Keating-Crawford Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and cSEND director, said.

Most recently, Takach served as a senior scientist and project manager at the Gas Technology Institute, where he spent more than a decade developing solutions to clients’ challenges in an extremely important segment of the energy industry: natural gas. While at GTI, he was directly responsible for and contributed to $4 million in project sales and deployed a Web-based project management system for planning projects and for tracking resources and deliverables across all projects. His responsibilities spanned a wide spectrum from project development, project management, proposal preparation, project costing, hands-on technical development and execution, client communications, budget control, project team leadership and the analysis of project risks and safety.

Prior to joining GTI, he served as an assistant professor of physics at Wayne State University, where he utilized his analytic and problem-solving abilities to unravel research problems in diverse areas such as electronics development, data acquisition, data processing, program/code development and the detailed analysis of data.

A 1986 graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Takach received his master’s degree in physics (1990) and doctorate in elementary particle physics (1993) from Yale University. He also served as a postdoctoral fellow in the physics department at Cambridge University, England, where he spent most of his time designing and implementing control software and methods for processing detector data.

Built upon the foundations laid by the Notre Dame Energy Center, a College of Engineering research center (initiated in 2005), and the Sustainable Energy Initiative, a Strategic Research Investment (funded by the University in 2010), cSEND addresses the global challenges to create an affordable, sustainable energy future, which is a vital part of Notre Dame’s mission to respect life, value God’s creations and advance social justice for all people.

For more information about energy-related research, education and outreach, visit http://energy.nd.edu.

Originally published by William G. Gilroy at newsinfo.nd.edu on June 20, 2012.